Arthur Lowe

Lowe made his debut at the Manchester Repertory Theatre in 1945, where he was paid £5 per week for twice-nightly performances.[4][7] He worked with repertory companies around the country and became known for his character roles, which included parts in the West End musicals Call Me Madam, Pal Joey and The Pajama Game. An early brief film role was as a reporter for Tit-Bits magazine, near the end of Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949). Lowe married Joan Cooper (1922–1989) on 10 January 1948. They had met in 1945 when she was his leading lady at the Manchester Repertory Theatre and they remained together until his death. Their son, Stephen Lowe, was born on 23 January 1953.[4][7]

By the 1960s Lowe had made the transition to television and landed a regular role as draper/lay preacher Leonard Swindley in the northern soap opera Coronation Street (1960–65). His character received sufficient approval from viewers for him to appear in the spin-off series, Pardon the Expression (1966) and its sequel Turn Out the Lights (1967). Leonard Swindley was not a role Lowe relished and he longed to move on. During the months he was not playing Swindley, he remained busy on stage or making one-off guest appearances in other TV series such as Z-Cars (1962) and The Avengers (1967).

In 1968 Lowe was cast in his best remembered role, as Captain Mainwaring in the BBC sitcom Dad's Army (1968–1977). His colleagues on the show later remarked that the role resembled him: pompous and bumbling. Lowe had a clause written into his contract, specifying that he would never have to lose his trousers.[8] He also played Mainwaring's drunken brother Barry Mainwaring, in the 1975 Christmas episode "My Brother and I". Lowe and his character also surfaced in a radio version of Dad's Army, a stage play and a feature-length film released in 1971. While Dad's Army was not in production, Lowe appeared in plays for the National Theatre Company at the Old Vic and the Royal Court Theatre. In 1968, Lowe was invited by Laurence Olivier to act at the National Theatre at the Old Vic and appeared in Somerset Maugham's Home and Beauty in 1968 and later The Tempest in 1974 with John Gielgud.[9]

He also had prominent parts in several films directed by Lindsay Anderson, including if.... (1968) and O Lucky Man! (1973). His other film roles during this period included Spike Milligan's surreal The Bed Sitting Room (1969), in which he mutates into a parrot, a drunken butler in The Ruling Class (1972) with Peter O'Toole and Theatre of Blood (1973), a horror film starring Vincent Price, with Lowe as a critic murdered by the deranged actor played by Price.

On television, he appeared twice as a guest performer on The Morecambe and Wise Show (1971 and 1977), alongside Richard Briers in a series of Ben Travers farces for the BBC, as the pompous Dr Maxwell in the ITV comedy Doctor at Large (1971) and as Redvers Bodkin, a snooty, old-fashioned butler, in the short-lived sitcom The Last of the Baskets (1971–72). Between 1971 and 1973 Lowe joined Dad's Army colleague Ian Lavender, on the BBC radio comedy Parsley Sidings and played Mr Micawber in a BBC television serial of David Copperfield (1974). He employed a multitude of voices on the BBC animated television series Mr. Men (1974), in which he was the narrator.

In 1972, Lowe also recorded the novelty songs "How I Won The War" and "My Little Girl, My Little Boy".[10]

While touring at coastal theatres with his wife, Lowe used his 1885 former steam yacht Amazon as a floating base. He bought Amazon as a houseboat in 1968, but realised her potential and took her back to sea in 1971; this vessel is still operating in the Mediterranean.[11] The ship had a bar with a semicircular notch cut halfway along, to enable both the portly figure of Lowe and his wife to serve behind the bar at the same time, acting as hosts during the parties they threw on board.[12]

In an interview for a Dad's Army retrospective on BBC television in 2010, Lowe's co-star, Clive Dunn, described him sitting at the bar in the evenings when they were filming on location, consuming a drink which Lowe named 'Amazon' after his yacht. Dunn described the drink as comprising "gin and ginger ale, with a single slice of cucumber".[13]

When Dad's Army ended in 1977, Lowe remained in demand, taking starring roles in television comedies such as Bless Me, Father (1978–1981), as the mischievous Catholic priest Father Charles Clement Duddleswell and in Potter (1979–80) as the busybody Redvers Potter. By now he was making many television commercials, but his later stage career mainly involved touring the provinces, appearing in plays and pantomimes with his wife, Joan.

In 1981 he reprised his role as Captain Mainwaring for the pilot episode of It Sticks Out Half a Mile, a radio sequel to Dad's Army. At Christmas 1981, Lowe appeared in pantomime with his wife. His last film role was in Lindsay Anderson's Britannia Hospital (1982). In January 1982, Richard Burton had his private aeroplane fly Lowe to film a cameo role in the television series Wagner, his last screen performance.